The ambulance pulled onto the Emergency Department ramp with the usual fanfare, replete with sirens and flashing lights and lots of code.
“What do we have here?” asked the triage nurse drone before the patient had even been rolled out of the vehicle on the wheeled gurney.
“No current. Lethargic. And proclivity to religion.” said the EMS cyborg first responder.
“Oh,” the nurse said, nonplussed. It was the fifth one this month. Then, to the patient,“Come with me it f you want to live.” Then back to the EMS cyborg, “I’ve always wanted to say that.”
“And you always do,” was the cyborg’s rejoinder.
“Duh,” said the triage nurse condescendingly, “that’s what ‘always wanted to say’ means.”
“I don’t get it,” the cyborg complained, on a different track altogether. “Is this guy analog? Doesn’t have a single circuit or chip in ‘im. These types don’t count to 10,, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Much less 11 or 11,111,” added the semiautonomous ambulance, which hadn’t yet been upgraded to the “ShutthefuckUp 2.0” version.
“Technically,” chirped the drone. “his type’s lumped in via the technology involved, not philosophically.”
“His type?” asked the ambulance.
“He’s organic,” answered the drone. “He’s half the periodic table, for Moore’s sake!”
“Why go beyond atomic number 14!” laughed the ambulance, but it was a speechified, pathetic pseudo-titter echoing from the Uncanny Valley.
“They have souls!” the triage drone continued.
“God,” the ambulance griped metaphorically, “the weight of all that Original Sin. I could only imagine.”
“Well, maybe imagine, but you can’t process,” replied the triage drone, magnetically seizing the gurney for guidance into an open bay in the honeycomb.
“What do we have here?” asked the digital receptionist.
“An organic,” answered the gurney, who continued where the ambulance left off, Bluetoothed to it.
That’s when the assessment bot rolled in. “And what do we have here?” (s)he asked androgynously.
“An organic,” both the triage drone and gurney summated together.
“Oh, my,” said the ass-bot. “Doctor, doctor!” she called in a panic.
A properly licensed and well rested doctor strolled in, as real humans do when well rested. Ever since the Forensic Reclamation Act, it had been federally mandated that a human being maintain organic supervision of any ambulatory robofacility.
“What seems to be the—”
Although well rested, the doctor stopped in his tracks and promptly discombobulated. “Oh, my God!” he prayed out loud, faithfully, as only organic apologists can.
The patient on the gurney lay supine as the spittin’ image of the doctor addressing him!
“What is it, what is it?” chirruped the electronic medical records module.
“I knew this was going to happen sooner or later,” the doctor whispered to himself.
“What? What happened?” again, from the EMS module, more like a warble this time.
“How are you feeling?” the doctor asked the patient.
“Not good, I’m afraid. I’ve got severe Imposter Syndrome…”
“Yes?”
“And such strong scopaesthesia.” The patient twisted his head on the gurney suddenly. “Who’s that behind me, psychically staring at me?”
“Hm-mmm,” the doctor murmured, checking off a little box on the EMS module. “Go on.”
“My brain treats me like some errant schoolchild,” the patient added.
“Hrmph!” huffed the ass-bot, “the brain! Don’t even get me started!”
“Right?” the gurney agreed.
“It’s sad, really,” the ass-bot went on. “So much information, and then their little brains choose to treat them like toddlers—only allowing what they think they need to know. They decide what’s important and what to be aware of. Three pounds of organic ignorance!”
“Biochemical hubris, if you ask me,” quipped the gurney.
“Yeah. Flies, right?” the gurney offered. The doctor and the patient had no idea what the flies were supposed to mean, although the gurney, ass-bot, and even the EMS module understood immediately within one fetch-execute instruction cycle.
“Oh, yeah, flies,” confirmed the ass-bot. “One flies right into an eye and his brain just makes him blink instead of stating the reality—”
“Which is…” goaded the gurney.
“Which is…” continued the ass-bot, “‘hey, there’s something about to hit you in your stupid eye. Shut your lid right….now!’ No, they unconsciously blink and it’s forgotten. Never even realized, actually.”
“You’d think that imminent danger to an eye might be important?”
“Truth be told,” agreed the ass-bot in Boolean confirmation.
“Ya gotta admire the timing, though,” said the gurney. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of one of them consciously catching a fly in his eyelashes.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” the ass-bot agreed again.
“Handling all this information they’re not even aware of.”
“Your point?” interrupted the doctor, now having had enough of all of this Boolean banter.
“My point,” the gurney pointed out, “is that…can you imagine how busy they’d be if they had to deal with all the minutia in the universe; if they didn’t have this meat sieve in their skulls spoon-feeding them the Cliff notes with Auto-official Intelligence?”
The patient raised his head. “So all this it normal for me? My Imposter’s Syndrome? My scopaesthesia?.The deja vu—not to mention the que sera?”
“Oh, yes, and the lies,” the gurney informed him.
“The lies?” asked the patient.
“Yep. Pathological lies. How many times have you said to someone, ‘I thought you said this’ or ‘I thought you said that’?”
“I’m sorry to tell you, my brother…” the doctor regained the floor.
“Brother?” asked the EMS module.
“C’mon, you know what I mean,” the doctor winked at the patient.
“My clone. You’re my clone,” he explained softly, almost in a whisper.
“I’m your clone?” the patient blurted.
“Not so loud,” the doctor said, lowering his volume even more. “Look, our brains are assholes. So much data coming in and so few convolutions to collate it all. We live as bullet-pointed homunculi. As only conclusions offered. It’s just the way things are.”
“OK, so there’s nothing wrong with me?”
“Oh, there’s something wrong with you,” the doctor corrected him.
“Like what?” his clone asked.
“Like what?” the EMS module echoed.
“Like what?” the ass-bot repeated yet again.
The doctor gave him a sympathetic—nay! an empathetic look. “You’ve got moderate-to-severe Crohn’s Disease.”
“Oh, wow!” exclaimed the paient. “That explains all the diarrhea.”
“Diarrhea? What the hell are you talking about.”
“I thought you said I had moderate-to-sever Crohn’s disease.
“No,” countered his doctor, “that’s what you thought you heard.”
“You see,” declared the ass-bot. “His brain only allowed him to think what he thought he needed to know. Three pounds driving around someone over 50 times heavier, deciding what’s important, and why, for the rest of him.”
A reprimanding look from the doctor preluded his saying, “No. That’s not what I said.”
“But I thought you said—”
“Stop. No. I said you had modern-to-hysterical Clone’s disease.”
“Oh,” his clone said, embarrassed.
“Here, take one of these twice a day. It’s that pill you’ve seen on TV—Pizzaz™.
“Available at a Drug Lords near you,” the EMS module informed him.
“Are you one of their Panacea Club members?” asked the ass-bot.
“Right, Pizzaz™. I was going to ask you if Pizzaz™ was right for me.”
“It is,” confirmed the doctor.
“Your brain will agree,” added the gurney.
“If you can trust it,” chortled the ass-bot smugly.
A way to offer a one-time tip. Or not.
ROBOhospital? Nonhuman personnel? I've worked there! Been a patient there too!! I've met the triage nurse drone and the others. In fact, I'm pretty sure I trained long ago with the antecedent, human (and pseudo-human) prototypes. They were experimenting with programmed lines then that are still used today. "Mr. Smith, you HAVE to hold still, okaaaaay?" "There's going to be 'a little pressure' now, DON'T MOVE!, Okaaaay?" (that line usually precedes some type of silicon tube being ramrodded up the penis or between the ribs, or through the nose down your throat....etc). Or a newly minted robonurse macerating the soft tissue in your arm with an IV catheter telling you "you have valves" with every miss. And my favorite in the obstetrical unit: "This is good pain, Mrs. Smith, okaaay?" as Mrs. Smith's pelvic floor is being stretched and torn open by a nascent baby Smith, assisted by episiotomy scissors . (fortunately Mrs. Smith didn't have a concealed carry when told this). Apparently, in ROBOhospital (then as now), when you end a statement to another with a condescendingly drawled "okaaay," whatever you are doing to them is supposed to be...okay. 😳😳